I have been here once before

As some of you may know, I spent the better part of November out west, spending time with family in Banff National Park, and visiting a long-time friend who now calls Vancouver home. I was gone for longer than I had ever left home, besides going to university, but even then, that was my home in its own way.

I’ve spoken once about space, and I believe it might be worth mentioning again, mostly because this theme has found its place at the forefront of my mind in the last few months.

Going out to Banff, I expected to recognize the benefit of creating physical distance from the site of my troubles, I expected to find that the things that create distress for me, were further away. Spoiler alert: they weren’t.

Thinker Mircea Eliade wrote a book called the Sacred and the Profane, a work which dichotomized human experience into areas of holiness and what is deemed ordinary. These are called ‘modalities of experience’, or rather, they are the ‘two modes of being in the world’. It is how we experience, or the interpretation of the process of unifying our consciousness with the corporality of the world. 

Sacred space is a significant one, it is for many, the reason we as humans congregate to certain sites, or why we feel significance in areas of our united or individual histories. I’ve stated in previous essays that space is notable both because of its ephemerality and because of the ability to tangibly approach it. Fascinating (to me at least).

The last time I went to Banff was in 2018, it was after my first year of university and was the first trip that I went on with a good friend and not with my family. It was an incredible trip, costing less than $1000 and bankrolled entirely by my full-time job at a pet store that kept me employed for the better part of 4 years. I have since lost that friend and travel buddy, passing away in early 2023, and still, I found her everywhere in Banff this time around.

The dichotomy of sacred and profane are made distinct by their exclusivity in experience. Sacred time, space, geometry, nature, etc., are made sacred by their experiential difference from ordinary life. They are marked by the sensation of holiness and are the moments of experience that are simply not ordinary. I think we can expand this notion to be beyond the traditional understanding of holy as divine, and instead refer to this sacred aspect as simply meaningful.

We can move beyond the definitions of sacred and profane and instead look to space as occupying either relativity or neutrality. In this way, we designate this sense of meaningfulness to the individual, and the experience of space as one of social constructivism, or the idea that humans form interpretations which then inform experience.

One line from Eliade’s book has always stood out to me:

“There are, for example, privileged places, qualitatively different from all others-a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”

Despite my expectation to create distance from the memories of my hometown, the losses and experiences I’ve had in the last year, I was reconnected with these old ones, ones that I haven’t really given myself a chance to work through, because I simply couldn’t at the time. Life is funny like that.

A motivator for me to transcend my current life was to gain some perspective, to take a break and to explore. I admire the path of discovery, but I was a little bummed to find it inwards. Like Eliade suggested, much of my time in Banff was marked by this difference, the sudden awareness of a time that brought me beyond what was simply ordinary. It had meaning.

Though I thought I could go across the country and forget about the losses at home, I headed straight for the space that connected me with a loss I felt wouldn’t haunt me the way that it did. I had little realization of the role of place in this process of meaning, and when the memories arose, one by one, I recognized both a sense of grief and of connection.

I am no expert in the definitions of the holy, but through much of what I find to be said about sacredness, I believe it could be encapsulated by both the experience of the transcendence of the ordinary (as suggested by Eliade) and the connection to a wider less identifiable unity. I think holiness and fun might cross paths at this deeper point of relatedness. But still, I worry we identify this sense of meaningfulness with an exclusive emotional experience, where we designate joy or overwhelming euphoria with the perception of meaning. I felt a lot of things when I was in Banff, but not many of them felt like I was meeting God. In fact, many of them bordered on uncomfortable.

Where I believed I could toss aside this perceivable continuity of my life (the daily) by interrupting (through vacation), I instead found a deeper connection to difficult memories, memories that forced me to confront a loss, and relate more heavily to the way I approached the space. In my time there, I had the opportunity to connect with these memories intimately and sit with them in both my grief and admiration. Both hold a sense of connection, despite how fragmented grief might seem.

Where grief can be defined as an interruption of love, it can also be a wider lens of connection, where we are threaded through interwoven streams of experience, and made able to discover ourselves in the places we least expect. Ironically, perhaps it is this continuity that requires an ‘interruption’, that requires the movement of the self to relocate beyond the current environment and into one which holds a different meaning, or which holds no meaning at all.

The beauty of travel is this: the moment of discovery, of learning, of facing unfamiliarity and finding familiarity. I have become deeply fascinated by this idea of connecting with my own history, of remembering and honouring those times, but still, it was a shock to me to feel all of it despite my romantic perceptions of the past. I was not simply experiencing my new trip or even my old one, but instead, reflecting on what an absolute pleasure it was to have had that friend in my life, and what a tragedy it is to know that they’re gone.

I was looking for this sort of segmentation, where I could, in some ways, detach the shadows from my feet and walk as if they were never there. But life is linear, and we have these stories that we carry (for better or for worse) that show us this common denominator: us. In many ways I wish I didn’t have these losses, but I am incredibly grateful that I lived alongside these people, and in the end, I’m willing to carry that hurt in exchange.

Now not all memories are worth exploring, and not all spaces with meaning are either. Instead, I think what I’m trying to say is that it is the interruption of our lives that can remind us of our longest running geography: the self. It has entered every space I’ve ever encountered, and my relationship with space will always be informed by my physical embodiment there, and the embodiment of those who join me.

Space can remind us of the nuance of memory, where the sadness of my past felt so solid, I was reminded of the joy that was once associated with that person and place, and the reality that much of that sadness is because I miss them. It sounds so obvious, but it was a slap in the face at the time.  

This is all to say that space and place are meaningful, and if we can remove ourselves even momentarily from the patterns of our ordinary life, we may discover more deeply the connection and continuity inherent to being alive.